How to Sleep

This is a delightful short that packs more laughs into ten minutes than you'll get from some feature-length comedies. Although it's been shown occasionally on the Turner Channel, How to Sleep was hard to find in a home-viewable format until recently, when it was included as a special feature in the new DVD release of the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. Robert Benchley's low-key, whimsical humor serves as a nice lead-in to the Marxes' more aggressive style of comedy.

Mr. Benchley acts as our affable host/narrator, covering such topics as 1) the causes of sleep, 2) methods of inducing sleep, 3) methods of avoiding sleep, and 4) how to wake up, which, we're told, "is very important." But this is no dry academic lecture. Our host, who happens to sport the most outlandish pajamas ever designed, helpfully serves as actor as well, demonstrating various positions such as the Supine Curl, the Ventrolateral Sprawl, and the Sleeping-Sitting Standing Crouch. He is aided in his analysis of sleep by some highly amusing animated segments.

This is a film better seen than described. I only wish I could enjoy it with a large audience in a theater, as it must be a real crowd-pleaser. How to Sleep won the Oscar for Best Short Subject of 1935, and led to Benchley's series of how-to short comedies for MGM and Paramount (including How to Read, How to Eat, etc.), but this one may well be the very best of his output. Heartily recommended.

Robert Benchley narrates with voice over, and then acts the various scenarios in this comedy short. Here he sleep walks, tries warm mile, counts sheep and tosses and turns to try to get to sleep. All with good humor. I've always liked Benchley over some other common narrators of the short fillers for feature films in the mid-20th century. His straight-faced, somber delivery with just a slight cynicism is always worth a smile at least. Benchley made 50 shorts from 1928 to 1945 - most of them in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He visited the doctor, trained a dog, showed how to sub-let a room or apartment, how to raise a baby. Many of these "How to" briefs were hilarious renditions of how not to do something - as in "How to Take a Vacation."

One of life's imponderables. Why is it that when we have no need to get up in the morning, we can rest easy but when we do, we toss and turn until ten minutes before we need to get up? Well this quite amiable short feature allows Robert Benchley to talk us through the do's and don'ts of trying to get some sleep. Late night fridge-raiding doesn't help, nor do dripping taps, or open windows or too much bedding. Apparently, we change positions at night some fifty-five times and using some fun time-lapse photography and an entertaining narration we look at some of the comfortable, foetal and downright ridiculous postures we adopt whilst trying to keep the blood from our brains for seven or eight hours per night. There's the tiniest bit of science to this, but mainly it's quite an enjoyable laugh at behaviour that we can all recognise, and when that is put into words it renders our solo night-time acrobatics suitably ridiculous.

'How to Sleep' is the Oscar-winning short comedy for the year 1935. It is a mockumentary, one of the earliest I have seen myself, on how to fall asleep. The narrator speaks about a man who has trouble falling asleep and we get to see the man and his actions. From time to time the narrator puts in a joke with references to alcoholics and the fictional names for events on the screen including sleeping positions.

It is amazing how funny this short film still is. Apparently in cinemas it was shown before Marx Brothers-films and it may not be a coincidence that their films still work today as well. It is not too long, keeps our attention quite easily and gives us many smiles and some good laughs. If you have the chance to see it then do so.

The only thing tougher than having to follow the Marx Brothers is having to go on before them. How to Sleep was one of 3 short films that opened for A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. For an 11 minute short, it is just long enough to keep the attention of an audience member from 1935 and 2005. Many of the short musicals and comedies that ran 20 - 30 minutes sometimes failed to hold its audiences attention before the main feature. How to Sleep is an original and interesting 'moc'umentary about how to fall asleep. A quick taste test before the real meal, How to Sleep is still funny to an audience 80 years later. Robert Benchley is great as a leading man who is funny be acting serious.